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Saturday, 21 March 2015

Popular lore has it that children who
are raised multilingually confuse their languages. One piece of
presumed evidence for this belief comes from the fact that such
children mix their languages.

Mixing languages is indeed typical of multilinguals,
of all ages: if using words (or grammar) of one language in another
were a sign of linguistic or mental disarray, probably in need of
therapeutic correction,
we would need to conclude that users of at least all major world
languages are potential clinical cases. Those languages are
historically mixed,
made up and being made up of bits and pieces from other languages
which, in turn, borrowed and keep borrowing bits and pieces from
them. Just like their users, languages need to adapt in order to
survive, because they’re there to serve those users.

The myth that linguistic mixes ‘mean’
language confusion confuses facts with interpretations – besides
indulging in common causality fallacies.
Child mixes can just as well provide evidence of early awareness of
distinct languages, as shown in a study that I carried out on my own
children’s trilingual language development, Three is a Crowd?.
One of their differentiation strategies involved slotting together
languages and language users,
for example by asking who speaks what (including newborn babies),
on the sensible assumption that languages are there for
people, and because of them. Another favourite strategy, which
I called Turn-to-stare, assisted them whenever words in one of
their languages for some reason failed them:
they mixed words of another language, turning to face ‘rightful’
users of that language as they switched to it, so as to engage them
in the exchange. It’s of course up to us analysts to then choose to
account for similar behaviours in terms of linguisticconfusion
or of linguistic appropriateness.

Propriety
appeared in fact to rank quite high among the children’s
expectations, once the users’ linguistic property rights, as it
were, became clear to them. Establishing who has the right to say
what is an important sociolinguistic skill that must be acquired: all
of us, monolinguals or multilinguals, learn that different uses of
language(s) fit different situations, as
different people do, too. Assigning distinct territories to languages
in this way also matches nicely small children’s keen sense of
property. Just like my children knew very well which toy
belonged to which sibling, they became quite intolerant of what they
must have perceived as breach of language ‘copyright’. This
could happen within each of their languages, when they would, say,
tell me off for using Portuguese words and expressions which they
strongly associated with other Portuguese speakers: they would frown
and fall silent or, later, respond with something to the effect that
“Mummy doesn’t say so, uncle does”. This could also happen
across their languages, when parental word choice or accent in
another language deviated from the standard they associated with
other users of that language.

Telling
parents off for linguistic shortcomings was in fact a favourite child
pursuit in our home, particularly when one parent used the language
of the other. It came complete with explicit apologies to the
presumedly offended receivers, ranging from asserting that “Mum
can’t speak Swedish” when I was
speaking Swedish, to nodding a patronising “He’s Swedish”
towards shop assistants in Portugal, upon dad’s completion of a
transaction in Portuguese. They, the children, were the ‘proper’ users
of each of their languages, and were therefore entitled to judge
because they knew best. Perhaps we can witness here the
(?spontaneous) emergence of linguistic bigotry
among fellow human beings?

Responses
such as these to perceived ‘wrong’ uses of language may well
follow from a broader sense of wrongness. One of the children’s
most profound disenchantments related to their realisation that their
beloved cartoon videos, in Swedish or in Portuguese, were actually
dubbed from English-language originals. They felt duped: they had
been enjoying something in a language which isn’t its,
and they then wondered whether that wasn’t the case, too, for
everything else that they had ever watched, or read, or listened to,
or been told. Another interesting episode relating to those videos is
here.
(An immediate consequence of all this was heavy on the family
finances, by the way: we had to invest in a brand new collection of
the same videos, in English.) Simply hearing the ‘wrong’ language
from any speaker could in fact trigger quite strong adverse reactions
at a very early age,
as well as later on: when we parents found it necessary to switch
from one of the home languages to a school language in order to
assist with homework,
it took quite a lot of cajoling to make the children stop cringing
and wailing “Don’t speak that to me!”.

The
children were well aware that different languages serve different
topics (skiing, for example, was consistently discussed among
themselves in Swedish) but, to them, language-topic bonds were
apparently weaker than language-people bonds – the extreme form of
which is found in ‘one person-one language’
prescriptivism, as I discuss in a podcast, Addressing common misconceptions about multilinguals.
Their own bond to their languages shows from their early linguistic
practices, in interactions involving, say, me and Swedish relatives
or friends: they would use Portuguese to me, as usual, but they would
translate the gist of our exchanges for those whom they knew didn’t
understand Portuguese.

Translating
and switching
languages as needed, for the sake of fellow participants in
linguistic exchanges, are part and parcel of being multilingual,
though often misconstrued as ‘special’ skills. Next time, I’ll
have a look at other feelings of ‘strangeness’ that little
multilinguals tend to arouse.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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